Brink Launch Center

Brink Launch Center

Written by Chris Boots-Faubert for SuperCheats.com

Introduction and Synopsis

Brink is a First-Person Shooter with a story line that is inspired by the Seasteading Movement, which advocates the idea of constructing artificial "islands" as micro-nations, and a sea-based sustainable lifestyle that permits the citizens to live independent of traditional government. In the world of Brink the earth has flooded, and civilization as we know it exists on these artificial islands -- in this case a utopian planned community called "The Ark" in which the notion of a free society is now threatened.

The natural disaster that flooded the world has created a large influx of refugees into the floating utopia that has stretched its resources to the limit, and pitted the "government" against the people. There are two factions in the game -- Security, which represents the government, and the Resistance who represent the refugees. Their city was designed to support a population of 5,000 but now it has ten-times that amount, and has been pushed to the brink of civil war (hence the name).

An emphasis was placed upon play flexibility throughout the games design process, so that play is fluid regardless of the number of players at the moment. New players can drop into the game, replacing NPC players on either side, and the player can promote their offline game to an online game with the push of a button in the menus. A wide variety of customizable content rounds out the overall look and feel to the game, and allows the players to pick their play style -- from serious to outrageous.

Exposure to the demo play provided to the media makes comparisons between games like Borderlands and Fallout 3 almost automatic, and while it is true that lately there have been a lot of games that fall into that survivalist post-civilization genre -- hey, it is a popular theme with gamers -- there just might be room for another with Brink, mostly due to the unique game world elements and the focus upon smooth transition for drop-in and drop-out play.

Game Play

Brink features a story-mode multi-player style of play that allows up to 8 people to play cooperatively against NPC "bot" opponents, or up to 16 people to play as teams against each other. Multi-player game play includes the use of customized content that is purchased with experience points gained in the story mode, and features a style of play similar to that in Saboteur and Mirrors Edge (parkour), an increasingly popular style of play that includes running, climbing, and jumping as well as melee combat as major elements.

Play is divided into four class-types that are designed to promote teamwork, presenting a squad-like structure with support elements from the Operative class. Much of the preview materials and early demonstrations suggested that while its unique combination of weapons and parkour work well together, Brink is clearly a team-play game, which would be bad news for the large percentage of gamers who prefer single-player gaming. As it turns out this is not entirely accurate, as classifying the game as one or the other is not easy.

Rather than focus upon creating the two sides of the game, the developers at Splash Damage decided to merge the single-player and multi-player elements into more of a fusion, with the results being that Brink is neither single or multi-player. Instead the player is presented with a subtly different play experience depending upon how many humans are part of their team, but it retains a fully-playable game play experience for the lone gamer.

Brink's new release date is set for 31 March, 2011, with a Mature Rating.

It got a 2/5 from X-Play. A 6/10 from IGN. Its nothing but a huge letdown of a game at this point.

It had a good idea to it, but the infrastructure was just horrible.

After playing it I can say I agree with the reviews. Not worth a buy, maybe just maybe a rent if you're really that into it. Perhaps if it had been actually developed by Bethesda and not just published by them it wouldn't have been such a let down. I really hope some developer re-works this idea of theirs.